The Jennings family is Black. As they tend the soil, two white men walk right through their front yard and into the garden, and begin to talk to Mary about their church.
They never ask anything about her, but plow through their rehearsed missionizing speech until his mother interrupts that she is already a Christian, a “pillar,” Jennings notes, of her church with a faith “as unfathomable as the blindness of these men to our Christian lives.”
The Jennings family lived but 200 yards from the white men’s church, and Willie regularly played basketball on the court in the church parking lot.
(There’s no way I can do justice to how Jennings tells this story. Please find this book and read it for yourself!)
Then, Jennings asks the question that has haunted me as a white woman ever since I first read it in December of 2012, in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder: “Why did they not know us? They should have known us very well.”
“Why did they not know us?”
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